For all that Razor To Oblivion gained them a cult following, Black Breath struck dynamite with Heavy Breathing, a kerb-stomp of an album that owed as much to Darkthrone and Entombed as it did the band’s namesake, Repulsion. Sentenced To Life kept up that early aggression, but now they’ve returned with Slaves Beyond Death – bigger, slower and twice as menacing. We cornered guitarist Eric Wallace to find out what could have possessed them to make something so good and so very wrong.
It seems like it’s been ages since we last heard from you guys, but it turns out it’s only been three years. What’s been happening over that time?
Three years is a long time, I guess. After we put out Sentenced To Life, we did a number of tours that lasted the better part of a year, and then we did a couple more fly-out things in 2013. Later that year we were starting to write songs for what is now our new record. We wrote some stuff that we ended up using but a lot of the stuff we were coming up with, we didn’t, but then shortly after that our drummer Jamie got hit by a car so that set the whole thing back a lot later than it otherwise would have been. We didn’t actually get around to seriously putting the record together until late last year.
Did you have to change how you went about writing given those circumstances?
I don’t think so, though there are maybe some differences. We used to practice in the middle of the night a lot of the time, starting at midnight or 1 in the morning, and so we’d get a lot of ideas at 3, 4 in the morning that seemed like a good idea at the time. These days, we tend to practice at more reasonable times in the day so we’re a little less distracted and we just get the stuff done. The general process is the same – someone’ll bring in a riff, or a series of riffs, and then everybody in the room will help arrange and give their input – sometimes what comes out the other end will be completely different and sometimes it’ll be exactly the same. Because of the leg injury, Jamie’s stamina didn’t exist after night time so we had to move everything to during the day. That felt a little different and took some getting used to, after years and years of only playing music in the middle of the night. We thought there was maybe something more to it than there actually was but once you got used to it during the daytime, we thought, “Hey, that works too.”
Do you find that you’re more self-critical when it comes to writing than you used to be?
I’m always critical of everything I’m doing – I’m definitely not the kind of musician that releases every idea that I have into the world, and it’s not something that the rest of us do otherwise we’d be putting out a record every two months. I don’t know if it’s more or less critical, I think it’s just us getting better at knowing what we like and what we’ll like a year or two, or five, down the line from now. Earlier on, we might think we like it and then two months down the line, we’ll think, “Ah shit, I wish I’d thought that through a little more” but I guess that just comes with more experience writing the kind of songs that we’re writing.
How would you describe Slaves Beyond Death? It’s an interesting because while it still sounds like a Black Breath album, there are so many departures on it from what we’re used to. It’s probably the bravest thing you’ve ever done.
I would agree with that. Hopefully, it sounds like a Black Breath album. It’s basically the same line-up that we’ve had on every record so far, so we have the same elements, more or less. We tried a number of things pretty different, and the one that’s probably most striking to people hearing it for the first time is Neil’s vocal style is quite a bit different. A number of people, when they first heard it, weren’t sure that it was still him singing, which I thought was pretty funny. That was something we tried in the studio for the first time. Neil tried the style that he’s singing on this record because we got to the point of recording vocals and we were listening to the music, thinking that it was different to our last couple of records, and the vocals need to fit this vibe a little more – a little creepier, or nastier, maybe. That was the experiment we did, and he started singing like that on the first take of the title track, and we ended up keeping most of his takes that he did on that song.
From that standpoint, I think it’s pretty cool and very much a snapshot in time that paints a picture of where the heads of everyone in the band was at. As far as trying new things, there are definitely more melodies woven throughout the guitarwork and the drumming is a lot more intricate than the drumming on the last couple of records. Overall, the compositions, the songs – everything’s longer. The basic idea that we had approaching the songwriting – I’m assuming this is what everyone does; this is what we do – is we start to think that we want to write a record. What’s it going to be? You have to have some kind of approach otherwise, at least for us, we come up with so many ideas, good or bad. They can be all over the place but they don’t necessarily all sound like the same band, even, from one idea to the next because our influences are all over the place. We approached writing the songs for this record from the standpoint of “We went short, to the point and punching you in the face” and it’s kind of boring to do that again. We were the ones who had to write it so if we’re going to be working on it for months, we may as well entertain ourselves, so we took the opposite approach. When you say that it maybe sounded like there were a lot of ideas that we hadn’t tried before, a braver approach, that’s our reaction to having put out a record that was, to us, concise and tight. This one is, “How can we expand on our knowledge of writing songs and make things way bigger than we ever have before?”
For you, how do you go about growing as a songwriter?
It’s like playing a game with yourself. There’s a bit of experimentation at all times and I only walk away from songs knowing more than I did before because I did it. You can’t help but have a different perspective if you’ve thought about, or written, any kind of music between different points in your life. It’s an interesting question and I don’t know how to answer it, but I know that to keep myself entertained, and for the rest of the guys in the band to keep themselves entertained, I think that trying something slightly different that how we’ve tried it before makes that whole process a lot more exciting. Maybe the one thing that is the most helpful to keep writing songs and enjoying them more and more is knowing when to stop fucking with them, and knowing when the idea is good and when it’s not. It’s a little bit more acute perspective than it is growth. I can get into stuff at any time. I can get into Persian music and start working on that and people will start telling us we’ve really grown as songwriters; maybe not. It just means I got into some other shit and tried a different scale or a different type of melody. It just depends on what you’ve been exposed to and what you’re interested in at that time.
“I don’t know if it’s more or less critical, I think it’s just us getting better at knowing what we like and what we’ll like a year or two, or five, down the line from now.”
What about the individual tracks on Slaves Beyond Death? Were there any that came together especially smoothly, or one that required some serious grinding?
“Seed Of Cain” came about over a long period of time because we used some ideas that were originally written in the fall of 2013 but the song wasn’t finished until a few weeks before going out to record in the winter of 2014, so over the course of a year the song completely morphed into what it is now. It started out as maybe three ideas, and then we used about two of those and tacked on a couple, and then at the last minute added two completely different ideas and ended it. I’d say “Place Of Insane Cruelty” came about pretty simply in a lot of ways. I just played this really simple stop-start riff and I wasn’t even sure if we should use it, but I took it to the other guys and they were having a good time listening to it and encouraged me to run with it. The rest of it was written quite quickly after that. The instrumental that is the last track on the record we didn’t actually write until we got into the studio. We had the idea of doing it before we got there but none of it was arranged – we might have had a very loose arrangement for a couple of parts – but it really wasn’t what you hear on the record until we got into the studio. That one came together quickly but I don’t know if it was easy. Thinking back to the past we’ve probably spent less time, from to back, on songs in general because the running times of the tracks is shorter. It’s easier to write a two and a half minute song on the first pass because you can only fit a few ideas in, but if you have a six, seven minute long song, you have to expand on those ideas at least once or it starts to get a little boring.
I also wanted to comment on the creepy artwork. How did it come about and how does it fit conceptually with the album?
The lyrics on the record – I’m not going to call it a concept record because that brings up ideas in peoples’ heads – but thematically, the lyrics are all about the same idea, and the artwork ties in with that. Neil’s approach to writing the lyrics for this was to be inside the mind of a serial killer. Someone that’s completely depraved and consumed in his own darkness, dead set on possessing someone’s soul and having power over them in this world and in the next. A lot of the themes deal with that and so does the artwork. We were sitting around when we came up with the title and we thought that was a pretty appropriate description of what does go on inside the minds of these types of people we end up seeing on the news, especially in the 70s and 80s in America. The way these peoples’ minds operate is fascinating and you’ll hear some similarities between cases where they have this obsessive desire to gain control over someone and use them as they wish now and somehow, once they’re gone and dead, they get to continue doing that to them. It’s a fucking wild idea, for sure. We got in touch with Paolo Girardi, who lives in Italy and has painted some great record covers over the past handful of years, and asked him if he was interested in doing the artwork, because up until this record we’d pretty much put together all of the artwork ourselves. It was our first time commissioning someone to do artwork that we didn’t have that much control over, which was somewhat interesting to us. I talked to him and sent him an email with a bunch of our ideas; things we did want and things we didn’t want. Pretty much from there, Paolo took it and maybe a month later he sent us the album artwork. We were excited to do it, we were excited to work with him and it was great. I would recommend him.
I didn’t know about that concept but the idea comes across in the music. Where you older records had a ‘bursting out of the grave’ feel, this one has a lot more malice and bloodlust. Do you write the lyrics in tandem with the music or are they typically kept separate?
Neil writes pretty much all the lyrics. Except for an idea here and there, or words for a chorus, we all help with arranging but Neil writes all the lyrics and doesn’t write any of the music. I’m sure there’s some disconnect there – no-one is sitting with an acoustic guitar singing the lyrics that become the song and then hears the riff underneath, so it’s not exactly in tandem – but while we’re rehearsing songs or coming up with ideas, Neil’s always there. He’s got books and journals full of stuff he’s written, so he’ll basically sit there and listen up until we’re about to record and then he’ll start putting it to the music. It’s rarely done much before that. We definitely had some times where the music being put together and the words don’t seem to go together that well and we’ll change them at the last minute but I think Neil can hone in on the general vibe. The lyrics are usually about fairly dark, evil and rage-filled shit, no matter what the topic is. They’re all coming from a place of not being happy with the world, so if the music’s loud and abrasive the lyrics will fit.
What do you feel is the ideal scenario to listen to Slaves Beyond Death?
There’s a couple. One would probably be sitting around at home, stoned out of your mind and zoning out, and the other one, if you really wanted to have the interactive trip, would be listening to the record, most likely in the Pacific North-West, driving around the areas where the people talked about loosely on the record would have done their driving while looking for potential victims. That would be an interesting way of doing it but I haven’t tried it yet.
Well, we may as well end on a cheery note but are there any serial killers that you find particularly fascinating?
Honestly, I don’t know if there are many that are not interesting. I don’t think I could ever wrap my head around how crazy you would have to be to feel or think the things that these people have done – I’m not someone who’s going to snap and become that just because I’m in a band that has lyrics about it. Gary Ridgway is a wild one, Ted Bundy, Manson’s crazy… really, whichever one I’m reading a book about at that moment or, more likely, Neil is telling me stuff about. He’s more the connoisseur, for sure. The ones that get more interesting, to me, are the ones who develop their justification and their involvement with their procedure, because there’s always some kind of procedure. There have been serial killers that have been found out to have only done a handful, or maybe they get caught after a certain amount, and it doesn’t seem very well thought-out at that point, but when you start getting up into 20, 30 or 70, 80 murders over years and years, there’re things that have to be going on inside someone like Gary Ridgeway’s brain to do that, and the evolution of why they’re doing it and why they must keep doing it. It’s a whole different world. Peeping inside the mind of a crazy person – it’s fascinating.